The Clover

Ever jump off a cliff or a high ledge into water?  There is great rush of adrenaline that comes because you don’t know how it’s going to go.  There is only one way to find out. 

Today was a lot like that.  I flew twice in the Decathlon.  The first flight was a dual lesson that I gave.  The second flight was me taking a whack at the clover.  The clover goes a little something like this:  a loop with a 1/4 roll that starts about 5/8 of the way through the loop.  (Yes I know it is going to be easier for you all to digest this with video. Sit tight.  Its coming eventually.)  So, instead of just doing a plain vanilla loop you end up 90 degrees off in heading from where you originally started. 

I started off by doing a few of the plain vanilla loops just to warm up.  They went well.  If you do it right, you should finish the loop precisely where you started it at the same altitude, and the same airspeed.  Loops in the Decathlon can be done really nicely at 140mph showing in the airspeed indicator.  You don’t need to pull more than 3.5 g’s in the D.  A quick word about g-loading:  it is virtually impossible to accurately describe what it is like to feel a “g”.  The most common description is to say that under 1g, I weigh 175lbs; under  g’s and I weigh 300lbs.  This is all true but it doesn’t describe what it really feels like or why the amount of g you pull is important.  Obviously, this is a good rainy day discussion for the site. 

With two loops done pretty well it was time for the clover.  I had only done this once before and only a few months ago with Marc Nathanson as the instructor.  This was my first attempt at doing it by my lonesome.  Just like standing on that ledge, I wasn’t 100% sure how it was going to turn out but there was only one-way to find out.  I pulled up into the loop, floated over the top as you normally would and just as the nose hit the horizon inverted I started a roll to the left.  You don’t pause the loop for this roll to take place.  You want the nose to keep working its way around the loop making as close to a perfect circle in the sky as you can.  There I was hanging 4000 feet in the air, upside down in an airplane saying to myself “here goes!”   I started the roll, kept pulling through the loop and ended up perfectly 90 degrees from where I started, at the right altitude and the right airspeed.  At this point I let out a ridiculous laugh because a) that is insanely fun b) I pulled a perfect clover out of nowhere.

That’s not to say the rest of my attempts were good.  Actually they were fairly horrid.  The big problem was that I was finishing the figure about 100 feet higher than I wanted to, and about 15 – 20 mph too slow.  This is a big problem because the next figure is a hammerhead and I want at least 130mph to start that, nothing less.  I did a few clovers with hammerheads and it worked out fine but there was a significant delay in getting to the hammerhead while I built up some more airspeed.  Not good, but that’s what practicing is for!  I came back and landed after repeating the same error a few times.  I wanted to walk through the figure some and wrap my head around how I was managing to come up with same result each time.  The best I can figure is that I am not pulling through the back half of the loop as I should be.  Once I start the roll I am holding the nose up just enough such that the back half of the loop gets shortened.  This would lead to coming out higher than I started but also a slower airspeed because I'm not giving the airplane time to build up energy on the way down.  I'll go up next time and look for a Eureka! moment with this in mind. 

All in all, it was good day both in the air and on the ground.  We don’t get many 80 degree days in March but I was glad to take full advantage of it.  Mel Harick snapped a photo of the G-meter in the airplane after my flight.  I pulled 4.4 g’s coming down out of a hammerhead.  I love this stuff!!!!